Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  “So, am I supposed to … forget the whole matter?”

  Bengt nodded slowly. “I am afraid, unless you happen to know the king, or the major editors of the big newspapers, and even then …”—he held his palms out—“there is not much to do.”

  Manny tried to absorb all that; he excused himself to go to the bathroom, on the way passing a wall of half mirrors. On his way back, he stopped by those mirrors and witnessed a rather helpless soul in a frayed sport jacket with a wearied look on his face. Defeat in the eyes. Is this where his goose chase was leading him?

  At the table Manny thanked Bengt and said he’d be in touch.

  “Please do not judge all of us by the Enskilda Wallenbergs,” he said, standing. “By the standards and values of Raoul, yes, but not the others. Raoul was a courageous soul, and more and more we Swedes look up to him, and what he accomplished in his young life. So, please keep up your search; it is a worthy one.”

  Manny nodded, and felt the need to get out—of Sweden, and of Europe; the sudden real-life detective story, coming on top of his Hungarian theater of the absurd, was too unreal, too unsettling.

  Back home on the hillside in New Hampshire, he wandered about, reflecting upon all that had occurred over there, surrounded now by his old environment, where country life and class schedules and boring routines were the principal matters at hand. Plus the usual Iraq war declarations by elected liars, crooks, and cowards, and yet a new shooting in a high school. Freedom, USA-style, meant shooting guns … No dark history hovering here, no odd fantasies, no unfathomable puzzles; reality here appeared easier and clearer, especially at the campus oasis. The psyche could stay cool and resilient, and not be subject to flights of fancy and fantasy. Let the heated memories and dementia of Budapest remain over there, along with the covered-up secrets of Stockholm. We here would go about our business of seeing movies, tossing Frisbees, throwing baseballs, bombing distant countries and shooting up the school kids.

  As for written history and RW, the old scripts and traditional perspectives would hold their ground. A memoir by the bizarre woman might be written for her daughter and grandchildren, not for the public. The Swedish-Russian Working Group could renew itself and go on digging, and come up against the stone wall created by Putin’s Russia, and Swedish cowardice. And maybe one day even Angela’s thesis could become a university monograph, or better yet, an alternative narrative from that of Prof. Gellerman, which would focus up front and center on the lingering doubts and cloudy coverup. The biographies now—and those in the future—suffered from lack of concrete evidence, important and huge gaps, speculation parading as fact.

  Driving over to Maine to hear the boy play and see the music camp, he passed through vast areas of open space and mountains, while listening to NPR (before it cut out). The usual fair-mindedness, giving both sides of the Iraq situation—did it have two sides?—delivered by the melodious voices. At one point the reporter was interviewing a Baghdad family about the implosion of their neighborhood in the past six months, a tale that proved to be informative and moving about daily life for Iraqis, not the headlines; but abruptly the studio announcer cut them off, thanking them and moving on. The “segment” was finished, its time allotment of three to four minutes used up. The melodious voice jumped from the really interesting family to a cute songwriter from Nashville! Manny was taken aback, angry. Is that where his dues went, for such stupidity? NPR, seeking increased “marketshare” like any commercial station, had become milk toast mainstream, its old liberal bite gone. Imagine them doing the RW story, giving it a full four-minute segment, providing both sides, of course, both Gromyko and the Swedish ambassador, for fairness.

  A few hours of green hills later, he found the boy messy-haired, bushy-tailed, and excited. He gave him the visiting presents: two musical scores, a few DVDs (of conductors) and CDs of cellists, and a leather pouch for his music. “Wow, Dad, these are great!” He hugged his father warmly. In return, Manny asked him to play a little, before dinner, and they found an empty studio in the woods. Josh played a prelude of Bach, slow and lovely, and Manny applauded his rich sound. Smiling puckishly, he said, “Want to hear something else a little different, Dad?”

  “Sure,” he told him.

  He commenced to play a new piece, strange and unfamiliar, odd sounds mingling with felt melodies, and the whole thing mixed and surprising. After five or six minutes, he was finished, and looked up, “What do you think?”

  “Well, I don’t really know. But it’s interesting. Who wrote it?”

  His face glowing, he said, “I did.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Hey,” he uttered, “that’s wonderful!”

  “Thanks a lot. It’s not finished yet.”

  Manny paused. “Do you have a name yet?”

  He nodded, shyly, and said, “I call it the Wallenberg Suite.”

  Taken aback, he didn’t know what to do, but he was so moved by his impulse that he got up and gave him a tight hug and kiss.

  “That’s special, my sweet composer, just very special.”

  “I am really glad you like it, Dad, ’cause I wrote it for you. I mean for your work on him.”

  Manny kneeled in front of him and stared at his hazel eyes. “You are a great boy. So thoughtful and so talented. Let’s take you for a real treat over at that restaurant in Bridgeton, the one you’ve wanted to go to, okay?”

  Growing excited, he said, “Oh, yes, that’ll be a real treat all right!” And he stood up and began putting away his cello, his bow, the endpin. “Can I get whatever I want?”

  “Whatever.”

  Outside in the early evening the large trees were swaying in the light wind; they had never looked stronger or finer, and you could smell the delicious forest aromas. If Maine in summer was a piece of heaven, he mused as they walked to his cabin to put away the cello, what was it when you just had a suite composed and played in your honor?

  Over their dinner of lobsters and baked potatoes, they discussed the suite and the music he was aiming for … He explained how you “can’t really try, Dad, to give exact sounds you know to match the feelings or meanings,” and he nodded in agreement. “But I did want it to sound sad, like melancholy … that’s how I understand his situation, so I also tried to play it with more vibrato wherever I could … Did you hear it?”

  “Well, yeah, I think I did,” he answered.

  “Can we get more sour cream for the potato, Dad? The lobster’s great!”

  Later, at twilight, leaving Camp Encore Coda, he felt renewed by the boy, renewed and refreshed. His youth, his talent, his ebullience, seemed to be of a piece with the thick aromatic forest of the camp, maybe a little more magical. Sweden, Maine, and the Wallenberg Suite had washed away Budapest and that other Sweden.

  On the way back, driving across empty western Maine, Manny was again taken aback by the vast space of open lands and low mountains for miles and miles. Could they have dumped Raoul, after Lybianka, in some forsaken land like this, over in Siberia? Simple disposal of the body. Manny pulled up at the side of the empty road, took out his laptop, and began to scribble notes.

  Back at the college the next day, Manny looked up Sven Nagstrom, a semi-retired engineer who had come from Sweden as a student years ago, earned a PhD, and stayed on to teach here, with his lively eccentric wife. They sat in Rosey Jekes coffee shop, and he discussed the problem of the Wallenberg bank situation. How he had been cautioned and stonewalled, and then the whistle-blower had suddenly disappeared.

  He raised his eyebrows, sipped his espresso, and said, “It sounds strange all right, but not unexpected. They are a difficult family, from everything I know. Very difficult and very private, even secretive.”

  “But do you think they could dare be ‘criminal’ now?”

  Sven smiled narrowly. “Isn’t the line always thin between criminal and cautiously immoral for powerful people?”

  Manny stared at his blue eyes and nodded.

 
“I don’t think it’s any different here in America. When you get that rich and that powerful, you can do what you want, and maybe adjust that thin line around a bit as well.”

  He had a point. “Still, I wished I knew a good Stockholm detective,” Manny replied, which caused him to laugh aloud. “They probably own their own firm of detectives.”

  Later at home Manny scribbled down a few paragraphs about that thin line, with thoughts of following it up later on:

  In America in the late forties, just after the war, how interested were we really in saving a Swedish life? Especially if that life was somehow invested in the OSS, our CIA of the time? No matter how much Iver Olsen, who recruited Raoul for the OSS and his special “Pond” project, might have fought to rescue RW, our government was already engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The last thing the US needed was to show support for someone who worked for our Secret Service in Hungary and who might have been in some cooperation with the Germans there. No, our government would be happy to put pressure on weak Sweden to try to save Wallenberg, but we weren’t interested in doing the same to our forceful enemy who held him. Cowardice, or expediency? A bit of both?

  It was more important for us to save the German rocket scientists who were or worked for the Nazis, and other scientists, but not a gutsy Swedish diplomat who had served the War Refugee Board and saved Jews. Fighting our newly declared foe, the Soviets, was far more crucial than rescuing a single noble soul who had worked for Good. (Or was it that, just as we had failed to bomb Auschwitz when we had the knowledge and the opportunity—one bombing would have destroyed the train tracks, and the Nazis were not going to rebuild those in 1943–44—the Jews, or their Swedish savior, were simply not worth our precious time?)

  Manny scheduled a full day on Monday to see several students, check the library for two interlibrary loan research books, play a tennis match, have a dinner date. A sunny summer day in green New Hampshire, where the air was clear, the sky wide and blue, the worries few. (Intruded upon only by the occasional e-mail that might come shooting through, presenting a problem or challenge.) From May to October, rural New England was the place to be, a native version of Tuscany, only with more lakes, fewer tourists, better English.

  Gellerman felt his routine was too cozy and easy for his project, so he decided to make a point of imprinting Raoul amidst his daily doings, reading about him, writing notes, imagining him. This focus on RW worked like a dark point on the day’s lily-white surface, a Rorshach smudge to be interpreted in a variety of ways. Manny in New Hampshire 2006 sought daily contact with RW in Budapest 1944 and in Lybianka Prison 1945, and this smudge stood for mystery and remembrance. Searching for Raoul daily signaled to Manny’s interior self his desire to be in constant touch with the forgotten soul.

  Why? For living memory? For truth in history? For their developing, strange friendship?

  And whenever Manny would read the periodic news article about the sincere Christian faith of the current president, he smiled to himself, sitting at the hotel inn, and recalled that other Christian. Why did Raoul do all that, really? Manny wondered again, Why endanger his life when he was so young? Was it because of the appointed mission given to him by the Hungarian businessman Lauer and then by the American OSS and Olsen? Was it because of the crazy woman’s Jewish grandparents in the Budapest orphanage, and his affection for the Jewish mother? Was it because he had always been the black sheep Outsider, with a touch of Jewish blood, in the Wallenberg family? Or was it simply in his blood to resist, to stand up against brutal authority and overwhelming odds, as he had done as a young officer in Swedish basic training? There were Christians and there were Christians, and maybe the best, or most courageous, were the least religious.

  In the summer air, looking out on the green of the college from the inn’s white rocking chair, Manny reflected, and tried to fathom the truth.

  At home he found new e-mails awaiting him, including one from the lady in Budapest:

  Dear Professor,

  I hope you will take seriously my request for you to help me compose my Life Story. It will surely make for interesting reading, don’t you think? I have already started to “gather my private materials” from the country house, for us to work with. And naturally I will soon have to reveal to you a few of my long-cherished secrets, once we are working together on the project. I have waited patiently for the right person to trust to help me with this, and I now believe you are the one to put my full faith into. May I only add that Dora, who has excellent judgment about people, fully agrees.

  So the carrot was laid out there for him—but carrot or bait? Manny smiled inwardly and decided to wait a day or two before answering her, as he turned to other messages. A few from college students and colleagues, another from a DC friend, nothing urgent. After reading them, he adjourned to his study and turned to his new focus. From reading the materials of Per Anger and Berg, and actual notes from RW, he compressed them and wrote:

  On Nov. 13, 1944, the German head in Budapest, Veesenmayer, reported this to Berlin: “The deportation of the Budapest Jewry is going according to plan, despite the technical difficulties. According to SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann’s report, up to this day 27,000 Jews of both sexes who are able to march and work have left for imperial grounds. We can count on a further 40,000 able bodied Jews who will be transported daily in groups of 2,000–4,000.”

  In Nov. 1944, on the road from Budapest to Hegyeshalom in western Hungary, thousands of Jews, old and young, were being forced to walk the 240-kilometer route, an eight-day walk in bitter cold, biting winds, wet conditions. The strong ones who made it were sent to work camps in Austria; the weaker ones were sent to concentrations camps; others fell and died on the way. The forced Death March was started on Nov. 9 by the ruling Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross. When Wallenberg learned about it, he alerted his driver, Vilmos Langerfeld, the young Jew, and, loading up their Studebaker coupe with food and water, they drove out on the road to see for themselves the grim march. What he saw shocked him, and he wrote notes to make an immediate report. On Nov. 23–24 he delivered a brief “Reminder” report personally to Kemény Gábor’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and later, receiving little satisfaction from the Arrow Cross, he turned to the German overseer of Hungarian affairs, Edmund Veesenmayer. Here are RW’s own words, factual, restrained, diplomatic, in his “Reminder.”

  The Jews transported to Germany fit the following categories: Jews who had been sent to forced labor, Jews who had been gathered together through police raids and taken to a Budapest location like the brick factory at Újpest, Jews who were gathered for trench digging; and after digging the trenches around Budapest, they were sent to Germany on foot.

  The forced-labor people came in quite warm clothing and good shoes. They carry their belongings in a backpack or in a sack. The military commanders put in charge of them try to provide them with appropriate places to sleep.

  The above-mentioned categories of Jewish persons carry their belongings usually in a sack, or simply under their arms. The women do not usually have shoes suitable for a longer march. Most of them do not have gloves.

  The road from the brick factory to the border is 240 km. They mostly do it in eight days. During this time, the Jews are not given heated places to sleep.

  Most overnight stops do not have appropriate facilities.

  Most of the Jews get hot soup only once or twice during the journey to the border. The reason for this inappropriate provision is partly the lack of kitchen items, so if, for example. 2,500 people arrive at such a place at one time, only half of them can get food.

  The horrible sufferings and the inappropriate treatment result in some of them dying of digestion problems.

  Those having protection from abroad are treated badly, because neither at the Budapest locations (like the Újpest brick factory), nor at Hegyeshalom are foreign documents respected 100 percent.

  On Nov. 23 and 24, both secretaries of the Royal Swedish Embassy traveled to H
egyeshalom to check the originality of the protecting passports there. The above report is an accurate account of the experiences during that trip. In addition, the following perceptions were made:

  Among the marchers, there is a large number of people aged 60–70, and severely ill ones, paralyzed ones, etc.; 10- to14-year-olds; an Aryan woman; people without shoes; people whose belongings had been taken away by the Arrow Cross in the brick factory; and finally, people whose documents or passports have been destroyed in the brick factory or elsewhere.

  Many of the marchers claimed they did not eat normally or did not sleep normally and they could not wash themselves during the whole time.

  In Gönyű, there are a couple hundred severely ill people lying in a towboat without sufficient food, medicine, or medical care, in the most appalling situation in all respects.

  In Hegyeshalom, the people were given over to the German transportation section. The German SS officers were hitting and kicking them.

  In Mosonmagyaróvár, seven people died on Nov. 24, and another seven on Nov. 23. Another diplomat had counted 42 corpses on the road two days before.

  The people are so exhausted that they are barely human. Men and women are relieving themselves without leaving the road, and without minding the others around them. As the committee wanted to distribute some food from its own supply, they were attacked by the masses; people got in a fight in order to get the little sandwich packs.

  As a summary, it should be noted that the happenings on the Viennese highway are not in the least in accordance with the often-mentioned “humane and just” solution to the Jewish question. The Swedish Embassy has raised the issue at meetings with his Excellence, the Deputy Prime Minister (Szöllősi Jenő), the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Kemény Gábor), the Minister of Internal Affairs (Vajna Gábor), and higher-ranking officers in the party, but nothing has changed whatsoever. Moreover, the Embassy had been denied the permission to send trucks with food there; it has become officially possible only in the last two days.